OnStand : The Sportsman's Watchdog

In our last segment we set the stage. The question is simple enough on its face; should hunting be allowed in national parks? Finding the answer is much more complicated.

In exploring this issue, we should start with a touch of history. Through understanding how and why our parks, national parks in particular, were established we can find a baseline from which to examine the evolution of thought and policy. There is much to be learned.

AN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

Emerson wrote:
“Only as far as the masters of the world have called in nature to their aid, can they reach the height of magnificence. This is the meaning of their hanging-gardens, villas, garden-houses, islands, parks and preserves, to back their faulty personality with these strong accessories.”

Man has a need to be close to nature. From the time of Nebuchadnezzar, who built hanging gardens for his wife, to our present-day accumulation of public forests, preserves and parks, the human animal has pursued this need in a variety of fashions.

But the American approach is unique in the world and in history.

Whether in the form of royal gardens in Babylon and Persia, the Norman parcs of feudal France, or the Saxon forests and game preserves of early England, all such properties were private and only within reach of the aristocracy.

To the common man, nature was an adversary to be beaten and a valuable source of firewood and food – were you fortunate enough to find access to either.

With the founding of America, the attitude about nature, parks and public access to both would start to change.

An excellent resource in reading more about this historical perspective can be found online at: http://www.cr.nps.gov/history/online_books/haines1/

This web address will take you to a book entitled, YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK: It’s Exploration and Establishment. It was written by Aubrey L. Haines and published by the U.S. Dept. of the Interior, Washington D.C. in 1974.

This book describes in great detail some of the data I will be quoting throughout this part of the series. I chose this specific writing as a source for two specific reasons.

First of all, it is well written and apparently comprehensive in its historical research and fact-finding. Just as important, this information is provided by the National Park Service and is accessible through their web pages.

As we pursue an answer to our question about hunting the parks, there should be no question and little debate about the sources of our information. For their assistance in this project, I am grateful to the Park Service.

The first excerpt I would like to use explains this change in attitude about public parks that was referenced above:

Although the concept of common holding of lands had little influence on park development in Britain, it was very important on these shores. Enough of the commons survived in the mother country that Englishmen were not strangers to the idea of group holding of lands, and the colonists who settled New England also established that form of land holding in their new home. Boston common was established in 1634, and similar tracts were features of most New England towns. But they came to serve a different purpose than in England. Here, they were needed less for grazing and, in a land well endowed with natural resources, not at all for fuel and building materials. Thus the commons became the drill grounds of the militia on training day, and the fair grounds at harvest time. They were also the haunts of itinerants and traveling shows, trysting places, and occasionally even focal points for civil disorders. In brief, they emerged from the colonial period as informal village parks, giving the old English concept of commonality a new direction—toward a public park type of use.

The major difference between early America and Europe was the lack of aristocratic social classes in the New World. The American version of the park was not intended for use by the wealthy but, rather, for use by the common man. This distinction would have great impact upon the way in which our view of commonly held properties and parks would mature.

Excerpt:
Game preserves, at least in the European sense, did not appear in colonial America because there was no leisure class to champion such use of the land. Even the Great Ponds Act of 1641, like all colonial conservation, whether concerned with fish, wildlife or timber resources, was defensive. The intention of this measure, by which Massachusetts Bay colony reserved 2,000 bodies of water, with a total area of about 90,000 acres, for “fishing and fowling,” was to protect the colony against needs generated by waste and theft.

Even in the earliest days, our intent was not to preserve our resources for the privileged (what we refer to as Special Interests today) but rather to insure that our resources would be used wisely and would always be available for future needs.

However, industrialization would initiate a change of attitude in this country that was first voiced by philosophers and writers. They lamented the modernization of man in America.

Excerpt:
Gone was the old, slow moving, and secure rustic life, replaced by urban poverty and its attendant misery and crime. To such thinkers as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, James Russell Lowell, William Cullen Bryant, Henry David Thoreau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, the degradation was a concomitant of civilization, and for it they saw but one antidote: a return to nature.

The writings of these individuals became very popular to the point that some based most of their careers upon meditative writings. What few seemed to recognize and fewer still would acknowledge was that our prosperity through industrialization allowed for the leisure of such thought and practice. As we will discuss later on, this tendency to blame industrialization for the “fall of man” is all too familiar today.

The point is that these works of literature stimulated a desire in their readers to visit scenic places. Improved public transportation on the country’s waterways and along its railroads made travel much easier and more desirable. People of higher social status and greater wealth increasingly traveled for pleasure.

There was a time when activities like camping, fishing and hunting had simply been part and parcel of a hard life in wild country. This appetite for the “return to nature” transformed these same activities into recreational sport. Even adult games were created, such as croquet, tennis and golf, to fill leisure time in the outdoors.

Outdoor recreation became a priority for those with the political power to get what they wanted and, ultimately, Congress was persuaded to grant to the State of California that section of land known at the time as the Yo-Semite Valley and the Mariposa Big Tree Grove.

On June 30, 1864, President Abraham Lincoln signed legislation that required the State of California to “accept this grant upon the express conditions that the premises shall be held for public use, resort, and recreation; shall be inalienable for all time.”

It is important to note that this act did not create a national park but what it did accomplish was to set a precedent for reserving land strictly for recreational pleasure.

Throughout the late 1800s there were a number of explorations of the west and particularly in the Yellowstone region. The area soon become renowned for its wonders and mysteries and the concept of it becoming a pleasuring ground for tourists was not lost on the entrepreneurial spirit for which Americans have always been known.

Everyone who was anyone knew that these same privileged classes who traveled elsewhere in the country would flock to the Yellowstone region if provisions were made for ease of travel and comfortable accommodations.

However, there was a problem. Plain old working folks realized the opportunities to be found here, as well, and were starting to take advantage of them.

Excerpt:
There were other signs of the end of the period of definitive exploration, among them the appearance of settlers within the Yellowstone region. The Hayden and Barlow parties found intrusions at three points. On Gardner River, near the great outflow of hot water that had caused the prospectors to name it “Warm-Stream Creek,” they found a haphazard encampment of invalids who called their rude spa “Chestnutville”—a place Matthew McGuirk claimed that fall and developed into “McGuirk’s Medicinal Springs.”

Upon the hot spring terraces then generally known as “Soda Mountain,” two Bozeman men had laid claim to the hot springs and built a cabin. They were Harry Horr, the same who had accompanied the springwagon sent up to Yankee Jim Canyon to convey the rescued Truman C. Everts out of the wilderness, and James C. McCartney. Jack Baronett, whose rescue of Everts had gained him nothing but the inspiration to build a toll bridge over the Yellowstone River on the road to the new mines on Clark Fork (the present Cooke City area), had control of a site at the mouth of Lamar River. His was the first bridge to span the Yellowstone River at any point.

One of the men bathing at “Chestnutville” (Hot River) when Hayden and Barlow arrived was A. Bart Henderson, whose diary entry for July 24, 1871, notes:

Left camp at 9 o’clock & followed down the river. Arrived at Bottlers Ranch. Here I remained a few days, resting and viewing out a road which I located on the 12 day of Aug. 1871. It is to run from Bozeman to the Yellowstone Lake, by the Mammoth Hot Springs, built for the benefit of the travel to & from Wonderland, & to be a toll road. I soon commenced work on the same…

There were some who immediately began to consider setting the area aside to prevent this type of development. The concern, however, was not in the concept of development itself so much as in who would be managing that development.

A driving force behind the original movement to designate Yellowstone as a public park was the Northern Pacific Railroad Company. Their interests were made quite clear in several pieces of correspondence documented in this book. The bottom line was expressed in a letter to a Northern Pacific engineer:

Excerpt:

It is important to do something speedily, or squatters & claimants will go in there, and we can probably deal much better with the government in any improvements we may desire to make for the benefit of our pleasure travel than with individuals.

The preferred approach was to have Congress make a land grant of the Yellowstone region to the State of Montana, just as they had with Yosemite in California. At the time, access to all the wonders of Yellowstone was not possible from the Wyoming side of the mountains except by pack animals. Surely, wealthy travelers would not take advantage of this style of vacation traveling.

The Yellowstone region, however, was within the Wyoming Territory.

Excerpt:

It was equally evident that to take from the one for the benefit of the other would not only create trouble between neighbors, but also set a precedent no thinking politician would care to have lurking about lest his own environs somehow fall victim to it. As Hampton has pointed out, “The only way to preserve the area and withhold it from settlement was to place it directly under Federal control.”

And thus it was that the “high rollers” and “heavy hitters” of the time persuaded Congress to create a never-before-seen political subdivision, the National Park.

It is no secret that environmentalists generally vilify “capitalism” and “greedy corporations” for the destruction of the environment. How ironic those are the precise dynamics behind the creation of a federally controlled national park system.

It is important to note at this point that the rationale for setting aside the park was not to protect the resources from man’s use. Rather, the intent was to protect the park for man’s use. And even given the fact that the privileged classes were top in mind when this was done, the common man had something to say about it.

Excerpt:

On receipt of word of the Senate’s action, a Helena newspaper remarked:
“Without a doubt the Northern Pacific Railroad will have a branch track penetrating this Plutonian region, and few seasons will pass before excursion trains will daily be sweeping into this great park thousands of the curious from all parts of the world.”

Excerpt:

A little more than 2 weeks later the Helena Rocky Mountain Weekly Gazette took its stand with the settlers, commenting on the park proposal in these words:

As for ourselves we regard the project with little favor, unless Congress will go still further and make appropriations to open carriage roads through, and hostels in, the reserved district, so that ordinary humanity can get into it without having to ride on the “Hurricane deck” of a mule. . . . Already private enterprise was taking measures to render the country accessible to such tourists as are not strong enough to endure the fatigues of a regular exploring expedition…

If Congress sets off that scope of country as proposed, all these private enterprises will immediately cease, and as it is not at all likely that the Government will make any appropriations to open roads or hostelries, the country will be remanded into a wilderness and rendered inaccessible to the great mass of travelers and tourists for many years to come…

We are opposed to any scheme which will have a tendency to remand it into perpetual solitude, by shutting out private enterprise and by preventing individual energy from opening the country to the general traveling public.

President Ulysses S. Grant signed the Yellowstone Park Act into law on March 1, 1872. Its purpose was spelled out in the text of the act follows:

”...is hereby reserved and withdrawn from settlement, occupancy, or sale under the laws of the United States, and dedicated and set apart as a public park or pleasuring-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people…”

In Part III of this series, we’ll be talking about the evolution of management philosophy and practice since these early days and how they have bearing on our question:

Should hunting be allowed in national parks?